Date: Tue, 14 November 2006 14:02:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - November 14





                                   SuitWatch -- November 14, 2006
 _______________________________________________________


 Will ISPs save the Net?

   We're thinking about buying a big screen: one of those door-sized "HD" jobs
   that's actually a 1920 x 1080 computer display. I'm tempted to make the move
   right now, because I'm at a friend's house, where his big screen does
   double-duty as computer display and what we still call "TV". From his easy
   chair he controls the computer screen with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
   When he wants to watch TV, he picks up the remote control, changes the
   screen input and watches HD cable.

   On election nigh, he switched back and forth between computer and TV inputs,
   illustrating the stark contrast between the infinite choices in the
   computer/network world and the finite choices from the old TV system. This
   difference becomes critical as we look forward to the growth of the Net.

   The HD programs carried by a handful of TV channels are far better than
   anything we got from the old 540-line NTSC system. Sports, music videos and
   nature footage are especially compelling. But the rest of the selection is
   mostly the Same Old Stuff we've been fed by cable for decades, with marginal
   interactive improvements. Flaws in low-resolution NTSC images are vastly
   enlarged. Especially annoying are MPEG compression artifacts that make every
   frame look like a bad photo saved at the lowest JPEG quality - only worse. I
   don't think you can save a JPEG in a way that makes it look this bad:
   "folds" in aliasing, quilting, blocking, mosquito noise... all over the
   place

   Movies from DVDs or downloaded by BitTorrent look good, though not as good
   as the best HD source material. Fact is, the best HD you'll see on your big
   screen is probably what you shoot yourself on your own 1080i (or soon,
   1080p) camcorder. But how about sharing that video? Your DSL or cable
   Internet carrier doesn't have that kind of capacity provisioned for your
   house. Even if you have Verizon's FiOS service, the company would rather
   sell you HD television. That's why they pull the fiber to your house in the
   first place. (If you're in one of the lucky handful of communities that have
   it. Chances are you're not.)

   See, even though the telcos and cablecos are talking optimistic trash about
   improving Internet service to homes and businesses, they can't see past
   their legacy applications. On the cable side, their most optimistic visions
   are about "content distribution". One-way, few-to-many stuff. Same-old, only
   bigger and prettier.

   They don't understand that the Net supports an infinitude of services and
   applications, and that the biggest benefit of incumbency is helping
   yesterday's consumers become tomorrow's producers. There is far more money
   in that than there ever was in couch potato fertilizer.

   The consumer electronics revolution is over. The producer electronics
   revolution is just beginning.

   It's clear by now that the incumbent carriers will never understand this on
   their own. There may be a few glimmers here and there. (J.P. Rangaswami
   http://confusedofcalcutta.com/ going to British Telecom is especially
   encouraging.) But the shining lights will have to come from somewhere else.
   I nominate ISPs.

   More than any other industry, ISPs were responsible for the early successes
   of Linux in the marketplace, and for mainstreaming free software and open
   source building materials. ISPs like The Little Garden, Panix, Earthlink and
   Netcom gave ordinary citizens their first tastes of the wide open Internet.
   While ISPs have been dependent on carriers, and while carriers have
   undermined the ISP business from below (helped in summer of 2005 by the
   Supreme Court's Brand X decision
   http://news.com.com/Cable+wins+Supreme+Court+battle/2100-1036_3-5764120.h
   tml), there is nothing to stop ISPs from providing an endless variety of
   services to customers that the carriers would never bother with.

   This opportunity was the subject of Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?
   (http://www.ispcon.com/conference/keynotes.php)- an on-stage
   conversational keynote by Elliot Noss and myself at ISPcon in Santa Clara on
   Wednesday. Elliot is the CEO of Tucows, a company that wholesales or
   back-ends services for ISPs to re-sell. These include domain name services,
   digital certificates, email, managed DNS and web publishing tools. Elliot's
   main point, however, was that the portfolio of ISP service offerings is
   infinite. And that this infinitude only becomes clear when everybody
   concerned separates services from network. Even when one of the services is
   providing network installation and support.

   It became clear to me, through the day I spent at ISPcon, that the leading
   edge of network deployment isn't what the carriers are doing nationwide, but
   what independent organizations are doing on their own by pulling fiber and
   putting up wireless (mostly wi-fi) networks. These organizations include
   companies, municipalities, schools and citizen groups. While some of them
   are offering services on top of raw network bandwidth and connectivity, they
   way they offer it makes the distinction between network and services
   increasingly clear. "Oh yes, we do offer some services if you want them", a
   guy from one wireless network company told me. This was after he stopped me
   because he saw Linux Journal on my badge and wanted to tell me about how
   they built their systems on top of Linux.

   Our conversational keynote was well-received. But I think what we need is a
   one or more ISPs to pioneer a killer service that addresses the need for
   home-produced video distribution. Sometime in the next few years, somebody
   is going to produce a must-see home-produced high-def movie, completely
   outside the vertical silos that run from Hollywood to theaters and living
   rooms through the usual channels. And somebody is going to figure out how to
   get that movie paid for without blunt coercion of Digital Rights Management
   (DRM).

   There is a much better chance that those somebodies will come from the among
   thousands of ISPs than from among a handful of network carriers.

   Meanwhile at our house we're holding off on the big screen until we can buy
   the camcorder and the production gear to go with it. And when we get all
   that stuff, it will be far more native to the Net than to the old
   distribution silos. ISPs should know that there are millions more like us,
   and that together we comprise a very attractive market.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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